Political prognostication is one of the dark arts, no question about that, but it does have rules. Or starting points, at the very least. Chief among those, is that the political apparatus of an incumbent senator’s own party is going to get the senator reelected, and that the endorsement of the sitting president of one’s own party is the greatest boon a senator running for reelection can have. Enter Donald Trump, who himself broke all the rules of political physics, and incumbent Republican senators running for reelection find themselves in a Salvador Dali-esque landscape, where nothing is normal and the scene keeps shifting with alarming rapidity. The question then becomes an unthinkable one, and that is, stay with Trump or desert him because that’s the only way to survive?
In recent days, this question has become exacerbated to an extreme never before seen in politics, let alone the Republican party. Sunday morning, former National Security Adviser Colin Powell became the latest Republican to announce that he was not supporting Trump but would vote for Joe Biden. This is in wake of Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and Cindy McCain indicating that they won’t support the Republican incumbent. Astonishingly, last week former Bush staffers formed a super PAC “43 Alumni for Biden” in order to raise money to elect Joe Biden and of course the Lincoln Project, a group of Republican strategists, got that ball rolling months ago. Joe Biden intends to announce a group, “Republicans for Biden” in the days ahead, as well.
So how does this affect down ballot races, most importantly, senate races? Politico:
The potentially awful news for Republican Senate candidates is another historical trend: the increasing link between votes cast for a Presidential contender and votes cast for senators, which makes it harder to create distance from an unpopular incumbent.
It wasn’t that long ago that ticket-splitting was commonplace. In 1992, 10 Senate candidates were elected from states that had given their electoral votes to the other party. But as party identification became more and more the key indicator of how votes were cast, this impulse all but disappeared. In 2016, every victorious Senate candidate came from a state whose presidential votes had gone to the same party. The days when Republican Al D’Amato could retain his New York Senate seat in the wake of a million-vote plurality for Bill Clinton in 1992 seem a distant memory.
Now turn to the Senate map, and it’s clear how these factors combine to produce a migraine for any strategist looking to hold the Senate for the Republicans. Not that long ago, Republicans were a good bet to hold the Senate even though they held 23 of the 35 contested seats. Only two—Cory Gardner of Colorado and Susan Collins of Maine—were in states that HillaryClinton carried in 2016. Even with Arizona and North Carolina as potential Presidential battlegrounds, that left at most four vulnerable Republicans. And with Alabama Democrat Doug Jones a very likely loser, there was little breathing room for Democrats to pick up the three net seats they’d need to capture the Senate, assuming Biden wins in November.
Now—at least measured by polls—a passel of states now seem within Biden’s reach, many of them with incumbent Republican senators up for re-election. He’s even in Georgia, where both incumbent Republican senators will be on the ballot; he’s even in Iowa, where Joni Ernst is up for re-election. And if Biden is going to make a real fight in Georgia and Iowa, that means a get-out-the-vote effort that will bring a lot of Democrats to the polls there.
It’s no new information that when the electorate turns out, Democrats win. And if we are to go by the example of voters pouring out to the polls in 2018, which allowed us to shift House leadership, that may happen again, and in fact, increase, due to a number of factors:
- Donald Trump is historically unpopular. No other president even comes close;
- His botching of the coronavirus and the collateral damage to the economy were giant factors mitigating against him already;
- Add to these elements his complete mishandling of the murder of George Floyd, which he has then compounded daily with the arrival of mysterious troops in Washington, D.C. and his war with the Mayor.
- Top it all off with the ongoing idiocy in Congress, where Lindsey Graham seeks to smear Joe Biden and go after Robert Mueller. Trump and his cohorts are egregiously out of touch not to mention desperate, ergo they do stupid things.
The electorate is a sleeping giant. If Trump has managed to fill it with a terrible resolve and it’s reasonable to assume that, then he will not only be toast in November, but so will his loyalists up for reelection and the GOP-led Senate may shift to the Democrats. One can only wish, because what’s at stake here is far more than the usual partisan issues. The survival of democracy itself is at issue, or there would not be the outpouring of bipartisan unity that you see, to take down Trump. These are not normal times, do not expect the normal rules of political engagement to apply.
I love talk like this. Keep it up.
I hope it’s more than talk. We desperately need to take back the Senate and get the court system adjusted before it goes totally off kilter.
SCOTUS is already wonky. All the ass hat judges that Moscow Mitch has put in will make the courts off kilter. The next few months MM will continue to shove the courts full of those HE wants. Conservatives, or as I call them ass hats.
Absolutely. And this is a process we need to reverse.
It complicates things, to be certain. But when Trump is gone, those judges are going to be under the microscope at maximum magnification. As such, we might see a housecleaning that would otherwise be unthinkable in ordinary times.
My question would be, if we control the senate and the white house, why not just have a blanket IMPEACHMENT resolution that gets rid of ALL 5-or 600 of Mitch’s judges in ONE shot, including a few of those guys on the Supreme Court? What’s that I hear? It’s never been done before? Hmm, what’s your point? If there’s ANYTHING we’ve learned over the past 4 years, it’s precedent means NOTHING. We simply have to fix the country, and NOT be apologetic or timid in doing so. And getting rid of ALL of Mitch’s judges in one fell swoop, and replacing them with people who are far closer to the mainstream of the American people, sounds like a very no-lose action to me.
It’s as you say, when we turn out, we win. We just have to make sure everyone turns out!
It is more than talk.
Look at how many people are out protesting in the streets over the whole country.
In the middle of a pandemic.
stupid is as stupid does. This maxim is the lodestar of these racists, who meet the definition of children of the Devil as reportedly described in Matthew 8:42-47. The book states, “he was a murderer and a liar from the beginning.” Jesus’s diatribe was calling out the religious arrogance of the Jews, who claimed they were the children of Abraham but had fallen into hypocrisy & collaboration with the murderous Romans. Trump has deliberately destroyed children & their families. He has told over 18,000 provable lies. Anyone, & yes aholes, if YOU support trump, YOU ARE EVIL & JUDGEMENT IS COMING! after all this life is headed directly to the grave, & that is the truth. Aren’t you the morons who believe you can be against Jesus’s teaching, warnings, & example yet wrap yourselves in religious hypocrisy?Correct me if I’m wrong, but i accept u can BS urself & others, but please explain how u BS the almighty all knowing God. Stupid is as stupid does.
There’s no question that if there is a life beyond this one and our morality in this world matters, that certain people are going to have nothing to bring to the party there. Most assuredly Trump won’t.
Oh he will, it just ain’t gonna be the party he thinks it will!
I’m rather fond of this bit from Genesis myself: “Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?”
One can only hope it’s the action on the street if it take hold we can move ahead and if it take hold we can win in NOV.
When Americans take to the streets like this, there’s a shift in government coming. I don’t want to get complacent, because that would be suicidal, but I think that you’re reading these signs correctly. That said, we still need to Get Out The Vote like we were 15 points behind.
S’what I’m sayin.
Those folks are anything but complacent. And Trump’s antics this week has been the best recruiting tool they could have asked for. The levees broke this week…and all the sideliners poured into the fight.
Another factor in political prognostication is “Never underestimate the power of the disaffected to muck things up because they didn’t get their way.” I’m kind of wondering what Bernie’s die-hard supporters/fans must be thinking at the notion of Biden’s planned “Republicans for Biden” group? Of course, I can imagine they’re already getting set to denounce the move as another move “to the right” and undo all the “good” that progressives have achieved in the past couple of years in the Democratic Party because, as we all know, “progressives” demand a level of purity that used to be the hallmark of the far-right in the Republican Party.
Now, of course, if Bernie had managed to get the Democratic nomination and decided to use the GOP’s dissatisfaction with Trump to get a “Republicans for Sanders” group together, well, that would just be all hunky-dory with Sanders’ supporters/fans (you know, because it would show how Sanders is a real “uniter” whereas Biden’s just showing his “true colors” as a typical run-of-the-mill right-leaning centrist Democrat–anyone think I’m being too cynical here?).
I may be totally naive, but with the country in the toilet and Trump in the White House I think that even the hard core Bernie Bros have got to wake the hell up and vote for Biden. Nothing else matters but getting Trump out. If even Republicans are realizing this, I can’t believe that any breed of Democrat needs to be told. But I could be wrong.
No one gives an eff about what’s left of the Bernie Bros and rightly so. You’re either onboard with Uncle Joe or you’re helping Trump. Other options are off the table until further notice. And in the face of all the folks who showed up at Lafayette Square and elsewhere, they look like the little people they always were. So that take, IMO, is likely a week out of date at minimum and probably longer than that. Trump goes…nothing else matters. The end.
It is not helpful to imagine a scenario, and then proceed as if the imagination were the reality.
Or as H. P. Lovecraft put it, “Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”
Best of all is how Trump will find new ways to remind us how much he needs to go in the next five months. And Murkowski this week proved that jumping off the Trumptanic carries its own risks.
Granted, 2022 is a long way off but I think Murkowski’s time as a Senator will be over after that election no matter what. Alaska is a weird state politically to begin with, but despite being the daughter of a Governor she’s never managed in three Senate elections to garner a plurality of the vote. I think it says something that she hasn’t been able to crack the 50% barrier. More significantly I think is what happened in 2010 when she lost the GOP primary to a Tea Party candidate. Although she and her campaign floated the notion of her running on the Libertarian ticket (in AK that I think would have worked well for both her and them) they said no. So Murkowski mounted what is usually a quixotic and of course futile write-in campaign. With a bunch of money from PACs and support from Native American groups in her state (which in recent times she has pissed off “bigly”) she beat the odds and became the only Senator other than Strom Thurmond back in the 1950s to win a Senate seat as a write-in candidate. She of course as we know kept her GOP affiliation and was welcomed back into the fold.
However, as I said Alaska has a weird streak and a substantial number of people (which at one time officially included Sarah Palin’s husband) who advocate for the state to leave the United States! She could have remained Independent but without formally affiliating with one Party’s caucus or the other (like Sanders and Angus King) she wouldn’t get committee assignments important to serving her constituents. So she stayed “home” politically and has since tried to play the Susan Collins role of “independent minded” Senator. However, her quite high profile dithering in recent years followed by voting the GOP Party line when things actually counted will I think have cost too much with Native American groups up there, and a lot of those Democrats and independents might be ready to give a Democrat the seat if a good candidate is put up. For damned sure I think she’ll lose her primary fight in 2022 only this time around but the write-in thing is the kind of lightning in a bottle she won’t be able to capture twice.
She’s done. Part of her has to know it. She had a choice of going a less cray Lindsay Graham or just shutting up completely and voting the Party line – she clearly doesn’t have the courage to go Independent and caucus with Democrats even though had she broken ranks back with Kavanaugh and done so she might be in a position by now to make it official and run successfully as a conservative, Alaska style Democrat in 2022 and win.
With our country on fire, our place in the world diminishing by the day she is fumbling along and ensuring she will neither survive a primary fight nor come anywhere near close to winning as a write-in and should she try the latter this time around she would likely (again assuming a good candidate for us) wind up handing the seat to the Democratic Party. Murkowski is only in her early sixties and could like many other Senators have had ambitions of serving another couple of terms, or at least one more. That’s not going to happen. So from where I sit she could show some true courage and be remembered well by history, or be written off a joke by history. Sadly, it looks like she’s going to wind up carrying on in a manner that ensures the latter.
There was a video diary I saw last week in which more than 100 Republicans, all or almost all of whom had voted for Trump looked straight into the camera and told anyone who was interested why they wouldn’t vote for him again. Not sure if I saw it here? Anyway–one guy’s words resonated more than anyone else’s: he said he didn’t care who was running, he’d vote for a tuna salad sandwich. And this was before George Floyd was executed on camera. The killer virus, 20,000 lies and counting, siccing soldiers on innocent protestors, too much to relate here, but it all conspires to put us on track to finally take back our government. Including those cowardly senators who have defiled this formerly august body. Enough. Far more than enough. As George’s brother Terrence declared, everyone needs to vote. To vote. To vote. This needs to be our mantra from now until November.
In a normal world, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ should have been the end of it. Thanks, Putin.
It would have been the end if a Democratic candidate had said it. Today’s Republicans have shown they have no principles, and didn’t believe anything they have been saying since at least the 1990s.
The evangelicals infuriate me more than any of them.
Yes, indeed, since they claim the highest of high roads.
Thoroughly well-argued, Ms.Faw!
I am expectant the the Senate will become controlled by the Democrats. Until very recently I have been hoping that McConnell lose.
I have switched positions. I now hope that Moscow Mitch DOES get reelected and that the Dems capture 60+ seats in the Senate. Then they can charge him with misconduct, permanently smear his name and his legacy, and then remove the smug SOB.
Wouldn’t that be satisfying?
Hey, if he was criming too blatantly under Trump, the Biden DOJ could still charge him…just saying.
Shadenfreude